By Ijeoma Olorunfemi
A technology company, SoftSmart Enterprise Solutions, has introduced a real-time result collation system designed to promote transparency and restore public confidence in Nigeria’s electoral processes.
The company’s Managing Director, Mr Charles Yakubu, at a news conference in Abuja on Friday described the innovation as a breakthrough in the country’s journey towards credible and verifiable elections.
He said that the system was powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology.
Yakubu also said that it would automatically capture and process election results from polling units as they were uploaded to the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) Result Viewing Portal (IReV).
According to him, the technology would instantly extract, validate and upload data from the INEC Form EC8A, the official results sheet from each polling unit to a central database thereby creating a live public scoreboard of results.
“We can go to IReV portal, scrape it, review results and we can actually go there and do what I call a digital ingestion into the database.
“All these make it possible for us to have a live scorecard of elections; everybody is seeing the results collated. Our technology is going to introduce what I call visible collation,” Yakubu said.
He explained that the application used advanced AI to recognise and verify the entries on each EC8A form within 30 seconds, achieving over 95 per cent accuracy.
Yakubu said that the innovation was made possible through advancements in AI and vision technology, particularly Google’s image recognition tools, which enabled near-perfect data capture.
He also said that the system would allow citizens, political parties and observers to track the progress of results from polling unit to ward and local government levels thereby enhancing transparency and accountability.
“When you watch the election night in America, you get a projected winner of an election.
“You don’t have to wait till the end of an election because you know the way the election is going.
“If there is a pattern of voting in a place, the only thing you just want to see is if the pattern has changed and if the pattern is sustained, you can predict percentage scores of candidates,” Yakubu said.
The managing director said the company would demonstrate the technology during the forthcoming Nov. 8 governorship election in Anambra where a live display would show the real-time collation of uploaded results.
He said the innovation would complement INEC’s existing systems, enhance efficiency and strengthen citizens’ trust in electioneering.
SoftSmart Enterprise Solutions is a Nigerian technology company that specialises in AI-driven governance and electoral management systems.(NAN)
Edited by Maureen Ojinaka/Uche Anunne
